“I shouldn’t have come here.”
“No, you shouldn’t. And will you please turn around? I want to make sure you’re not smirking.” He half turned towards her, showing his face to her, his expression of weary melancholy. Their lovemaking had felt to him more like a surgical procedure. Isabel had thrust herself angrily against him, all elbows, ribs, and bared teeth. Now she sat there furious in her painted gown like an Oriental empress about to order his beheading. “You hurt me, Quirke,” she said, with a tremor in her voice that she could not suppress. “You broke my heart. I tried to kill myself over you.” She shook her head in rueful wonder. “What a fool.”
He tapped his cigarette on the edge of the ashtray. “I should have telephoned,” he said. “I should have kept in contact. That was unforgivable.”
Her eyes blazed, glittering with unshed angry tears. “But of course you’re asking to be forgiven, aren’t you.”
He looked down. Somewhere nearby a church bell tolled once, marking the half hour. The chime hung for a second or two in the upper air, a trembling pearl of sound. “I thought,” he said, speaking very slowly, “I thought we might try again, you and I.”
Isabel stared at him steadily for a long moment, then flung herself from the bed and swept out of the room, her bare feet slapping on the polished wood floor. The bathroom door down the corridor slammed shut. He listened to the faint distant tinkle of her peeing. He put out a hand and felt the warm spot in the bed where she had sat. He saw clearly, like a forking path, the two possibilities that lay before him: either stay or get up now and hurry into his clothes and leave before she returned. He did not move.
They went downstairs, Quirke barefoot and in shirt and trousers. He sat on the sofa in the living room while she fetched glasses and a bottle from the kitchen. “I only have gin,” she said, holding up the bottle. She smiled wryly. “I am an actress, after all. And there’s no ice, as usual. The fridge is still not working.” This was how it had been the first night he had come here, the warm gin and the flat tonic in this airless, cramped little room.
Isabel sat down sideways to face him at the opposite end of the sofa. “Well,” she said, putting on a brisk and brittle tone, “shall we make small talk? You go first.”
He smiled, shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you. Nothing notable ever happens to me.”
“Aren’t you at your sleuthing? You always enjoy that—murder and mayhem, all of it happening to other people.”
He had left his cigarettes upstairs. Isabel pointed to a silver box on the mantelpiece, one that he remembered, and he stood up and fetched it and offered her a cigarette and took one himself. Passing Cloud—Phoebe used to smoke them; did she still? He did not know. He thought perhaps she had given up. He settled himself on the sofa again. The warm gin tasted like perfume, cloying and slightly viscous. “Ever come across Victor Delahaye?” he asked.
She frowned, and shook her head. “No. Should I?”
“He died. It was in the papers. He—” He stopped.
“He what?” Isabel asked.
“Killed himself.”
“Did he, now.” She watched him narrowly, with amusement. “I do believe you’re blushing, Quirke.”
“Sorry.”
“You don’t need to be.” Her smile was as bright as steel. “I’ve got used to thinking of myself as a failed suicide, so there’s no reason to be embarrassed and avoid the subject. Tell me about this man—what did you say his name was?”
Quirke took a long swallow of his drink, and winced again at the glutinous texture. “Delahaye,” he said. “Victor Delahaye. Business family—Delahaye and Clancy, shipping, coal, timber, garages, I don’t know what else.”
“And why did he kill himself?” She gave her mouth a twist. “Not for love, I imagine.”
“No one seems to know. Or no one is saying, anyway.”
“Aha—and your little gray cells are working overtime, are they?” She sipped her drink, watching him over the edge of her glass. “You really are a strange person, Quirke. Tell me, why did you decide to be a pathologist?”
Why? He could not recall, now. “I don’t know that I decided,” he said. “I think I just drifted, as everyone does.”
“Your morbid streak led you on, did it?”
“That’s it. My morbid streak.”
For a reason that neither of them could understand this little exchange lightened the atmosphere between them, and Isabel extended a foot and caressed his bare ankle with her toes. “Poor Quirke,” she said fondly, “you’re such a mess.” He was about to reply when she sat up straight suddenly. “I know what’s the matter with me,” she said. “I’m hungry. And do you know what I want? Chips! I want a bag of chips and one of those disgusting rissoles they make out of mashed-up seagull.” She stood up, extending her hand. “Come on, get your shoes on, we’re going out.” She hurried ahead of him up the narrow stairs, singing.
Despite himself, he was glad he had stayed.
* * *
They had to go all the way to Ringsend to find a chip shop that was still open. Isabel had a little car now, a Fiat, bright red and glossy, like a ladybird. Quirke was touched to see how proud of it she was. He had briefly owned an Alvis, and was secretly relieved to be rid of it. They drove down by the canal, under the dark and motionless trees. The roads were empty at this hour. There was a childish excitement in the car, as if, Quirke thought, the two of them had slipped out together in the dark, hand in hand, bent on adventure.
Isabel, crouched over the steering wheel, kept shooting him sidelong glances with her eyebrows lifted and her lips mischievously pursed. “Oh, God, Quirke,” she said with a laughing groan, “I have to admit it, I’m glad you’re back.”
And he? Was he glad, really? He made himself smile at her. He felt as if he had been sheltering under a stone and now the stone had been lifted, exposing him to the sudden glare of the sun. He did not deserve such kindness, if kindness it was. He had let nearly a year go past without ringing Isabel even once, if only to ask how she was faring. Was he to be forgiven this easily? It seemed to him almost a scandal.
The chip shop was a box of harsh white light behind a big square plate-glass window. The metal counter was chest-high—why were chip shop counters always high like that? Quirke wondered—and the owner, a dour fellow with a paunch and a lazy eye, had the look of a former boxer. His wife, thin as a whippet, kept to the background, tending the cauldrons of seething fat. Quirke and Isabel were the only customers. They stood at the counter waiting for their order to be prepared. Despite the late hour and the dinginess of the surroundings there was for some reason a sense of comedy in the situation, and Isabel kept giving off waves of muffled hilarity, so that Quirke, conscious of the shopman’s drooping and suspicious eye, had to work hard at maintaining an expression of stern solemnity. When the food was ready they took it to eat in the car, and sat with all four windows wound fully down to let out the fatty fumes. “My God,” Isabel said happily, “this rissole really is revolting, isn’t it?” She grinned at him. There was a smear of grease on her chin. “You see, Quirke?” she said. “Being happy for the odd moment now and then isn’t so difficult.”
Having eaten their food, they drove out to Sandymount and walked along the front to calm their queasy stomachs. The night air was still, and a vast and slightly crazy-looking moon hung at what seemed a crooked angle above the horizon, laying a thick trail of gold across the water. “Look at that,” Isabel said, “like a road you could walk on.” Quirke was thinking of her in her hospital bed a year ago, with her face turned to the wall, and him standing helpless in the room, not knowing what to say. “Don’t brood,” she said, as if she had read his thoughts. She linked her arm in his and pressed herself against him and shivered.
“It’s chilly,” she said. “Let’s go home. I mean, let’s go back.”
When they got to the house Isabel sent Quirke to sit on the sofa while she was in the kitchen preparing tea. The rissole, a glistening lozenge of gr
ayish meat mixed with grain, had left a coating of slime on the roof of his mouth that would not be dislodged. He smoked a cigarette but even that would not take away the taste. There was what sounded like a party going on somewhere nearby—he could hear talk and laughter and the tinny wail of a record player.
“Tell me about what’s-his-name,” Isabel called from the kitchen. “Delahaye.”
He rose and went to the kitchen doorway and stood with his hands in his pockets. He had taken off his shoes again and the floor was pleasantly cool under his stockinged feet. Isabel, who had changed into her silk gown, was measuring spoonfuls of tea into a willow-pattern pot. “What do you want me to tell you?” he asked.
“Tell me why you think there’s something funny going on—because you do, I know you do. I know that look.”
He pondered, gazing at the floor. “Well, from what I know of Victor Delahaye, he wasn’t the kind of person to kill himself.”
“Is there that kind of person?”
She carried the teapot past him and set it on a cork mat on the little table in front of the sofa. He watched her, admiring the glimmer of a pale breast in the opening of her gown, the full curve of her thigh pressing against the silk. She was a handsome woman, russet-haired, long-limbed, and slim. He wished … He did not know what he wished.
“He took his partner’s son with him, in the boat,” he said.
He went and sat on the sofa again. Isabel handed him his tea and offered the milk jug. “What age is he—the son?” she asked, settling herself beside him.
“I don’t know. A young twenty-five?”
“Were they close, him and Delahaye?”
“I doubt it.”
“Then why did he choose him to take with him?”
“That’s what everyone wants to know.” He sipped his tea. It seemed only to add another coating of scum to his mouth. “I suppose he wanted a witness.”
Isabel was gazing before herself with narrowed eyes, holding the cup and saucer close under her chin. “People usually don’t want other people watching at a time like that,” she said quietly. She gave a faint laugh. “A private moment, if ever there was one.”
Quirke thought it best to let this pass. He waited for a beat, watching the curl of steam above his cup. “Delahaye was a vain man,” he said.
“And yet he shot himself. In front of his partner’s son.”
“So it seems.”
They sat in silence. From where the party was there came a woman’s screams of laughter, and a new song started up.
“There is something fishy, isn’t there,” Isabel said. “Even I can sense it.”
Quirke was lighting a cigarette. “Yes,” he said, “there is.”
“Did the young man do it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then he did kill himself.”
“Yes. But what I want to know is why. He was vain and pompous and full of his own importance. He had to have been driven to it.”
Down the street, the record twanged and wailed.
She took the cigarette from his fingers, drew on it, gave it back, slightly stained with lipstick. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m trying to give up. They’re saying now they cause cancer.”
“Life causes cancer.”
She refilled his cup and her own and leaned back on the sofa, balancing the saucer against her bosom. She studied him, smiling a little. “Well, Dr. Quirke,” she said. “What’s next, for us?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.” It was the truth.
“What about your French amour? Is she gone for good?”
Françoise d’Aubigny. He said the name to himself and felt a click of pain, as if a tiny bone in his breast had snapped. He had loved Françoise, despite all she had done, despite all that she had turned out to be. “Gone, yes,” he said, tonelessly. “Gone for good.”
“And you’re back.”
She was still smiling but the smile had a flaw in it, like a crack across a mirror.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m back.”
What else could he say?
7
Inspector Hackett spotted Quirke before Quirke spotted him. They were among the crowd outside St. John’s, milling on the gravel in the sunshine in front of the church doors. Smell of warm dust, of hot metal from the parked cars, of the women’s face powder and the men’s cigarettes. Faint smell of death, too, of clay and lilies and the varnished wood of the coffin. Hackett was thinking what curious occasions they were, funerals, or this bit of them, anyway, the interval after the church service and before the burial, when no one seemed to know exactly what to do or how to behave, trying to keep a solemn demeanor yet feeling guiltily relieved, and almost lighthearted. They talked about all kinds of things, politics, the weather, who was going to win the match, but no one at this stage of the proceedings ever spoke of the person who was dead; it was as though a dispensation had been given for these few minutes, and everyone had been let off mentioning the one and only reason they were gathered here.
Hackett had arrived a minute or two before the service ended, having wanted to avoid going inside the church. When he was a lad the priests used to say that any Catholic who went into a Protestant church was committing a sin, and although he no longer believed in such things he still instinctively obeyed. Anyhow, it was not as if he was one of the family, or even a family friend.
He took himself off to the side and lit a cigarette and eyed the crowd, in their dark suits and black frocks and black hats with veils—a regular fashion show, it looked like—picking out the ones whose faces he knew and watching how they behaved. There were the Delahaye twins, uncannily alike. Which was which? That must be James, the one staying silent, while the other one, Jonas, talked and smiled. The dead man’s widow was with someone he did not recognize, a tall sleek man with ash-colored hair brushed back like an eagle’s plume—her brother, maybe, or was he too old? She wore a dark blue two-piece costume the skirt of which was very tight and emphasized the curve of her behind. Hackett looked at the seams of her stockings, and looked away.
The Clancys, parents and son, were in the crowd and yet seemed apart from it, surrounded as it were by an invisible enclosure. Jack Clancy was dragging on a cigarette as if he was suffocating and it was a little tube of oxygen. His son, looking more than ever like a bantamweight contender, was frowning at the sky, as if wistfully expecting something to swoop down out of it and carry him off to somewhere less grim than this balefully sunlit churchyard. Mrs. Clancy—what was her name? Celia? Sylvia?—held herself in that peculiar way that she did—standing on her dignity, Hackett thought—with her handbag on her wrist and her gaze turned elsewhere. The three of them looked as if whatever it was that was holding them together might loose its grip at any moment and send them flying asunder.
And then there was the sister, Miss Delahaye—Margaret, was it?—raw and red-eyed and coughing steadily like a motorcar with a faulty spark plug.
Trouble on all sides, Hackett told himself, and sighed.
It cheered him, seeing Quirke, skulking as it seemed beside the church door, also lighting up a furtive cigarette, glancing swiftly about as if expecting someone to be challenged, his black hat pulled down over his left eye. Quirke was probably the only one among all these people today who had not needed to change into a funeral suit.
“There you are,” Hackett said. He lowered his voice. “Grand day for a planting.”
Quirke did his crooked smile.
The mourners were drifting towards the graveyard, led by the vicar in his surplice and stole and walking behind the coffin carried on the shoulders of James and Jonas Delahaye and four of what must be their friends, curt-looking young men in expensive suits. The women in their high heels stepped over the grass carefully, like wading birds, while the men, concealing their half-smoked cigarettes inside their palms, took a last few surreptitious drags. Quirke and the Inspector joined the stragglers.
“There’s a sign somewhere in Glasnevin Cemetery,” Quirke said
quietly. “‘Planting in this area restricted to dwarves,’ it says.” The Inspector’s shoulders shook. Quirke did not look at him. “I think,” he said mildly, “it’s trees that are meant.”
They went on, pacing slowly in the wake of the mourners.
“By God, Doctor,” Hackett said, catching his breath, “you’ve the graveyard humor, all right.”
The burial was quickly over with. The vicar droned, his eye fixed dreamily on a corner of the sky above the yew trees, a hymn was raggedly sung, someone—Delahaye’s sister, probably—let fall a sob that sounded like a fox’s bark, the coffin was lowered, the clay was scattered. The vicar draped a silken marker over the page of his black book and shut it, and with his hands clasped at his breast led the solemn retreat from the graveside. Hackett had been admiring the two gravediggers’ shapely spades—he was always interested in the tools of any trade—and now they stepped forward smartly and set to their work. Mona Delahaye, passing him by, smiled at Quirke and bit her lip. Quirke doffed his hat. Hackett watched the young woman, not looking at her nylon seams this time. “Mourning becomes her, eh?” he said, and cocked an eyebrow.
The cars were starting up and one or two were already creeping towards the gate. “Have you transport, yourself?” the Inspector asked. Quirke shook his head. “Fine, so,” Hackett said. “It’s a grand day for a walk into town.”
Hackett heard a step behind them on the gravel and turned to meet a pale, middle-aged man with a dry, grayish jaw and oiled black hair brushed slickly back.
“Are you the detective?” the man asked.
“I am,” Hackett said. “Detective Inspector Hackett.”
The man nodded. He had a curious way of blinking very slowly and comprehensively, like a bird of prey. He wore a starched, high collar—who wore collars like that, anymore? His teeth were bad, and Hackett caught a whiff of his breath.
“Might I have a word?” the man said. He slid a glance in Quirke’s direction.
Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) Page 10
